JPMorgan says that Amazon Prime is the best deal in online shopping. While Featured Snippets have once again been shortened, learn how Google may decide what material to feature. Loading speed is now a ranking factor for mobile sites. Google says they can now gather information from many websites and paraphrase it to answer search quarries on this own auto-generated page. Read more about these stories and others in this week’s SEO roundup …

While insisting that snippet length varies by subject matter, Google has confirmed that shippets are once again being shortened. RankRanger found that snippets on desktops are now about 160 characters long while those on mobile are about 130 characters.

About 15 percent of all searches conducted on their platform are things that have never been searched for before. The statistic was 25 percent in 2013 before dropping, but it has remained stable as was 15% when RankBrain rolled out in 2015.

Google’s John Mueller gave some important clues on getting your website content to be used as a featured snippet. Mueller says that content that answers a specific question using at least one paragraph is often used for the featured snippet.

After making the announcement last week that videos can be added to the Google My Business section of Google Posts, it would seem that feature is now fully functional. Once uploaded, your video will show on both mobile and desktop searches.

It would appear that on April 28, 2018, Amazon made the decision to no longer participate in Google Shopping Ads. This decision could indicate that Amazon may be in the process of introducing a similar program on their own website. Meanwhile, it may be the perfect time for marketers to start using Google Shopping Ads now that Amazon’s money is no longer being spent on the platform.

Lithium Technologies who is the parent company of Klout has announced that they will shut the social media ranking service down effective May 25, 2018. Lithium Technologies says that they will soon be launching a new service based on the Twitter platform.

While the content of tweets will not be judged, Twitter has announced that they will remove negative tweets in search results using several different factors including tweets sent by accounts with unconfirmed emails, tweets indicating a user is stalking another user and the number of accounts belonging to a particular entity. While these will not be shown in search results, there will be a see-more button allowing users to see them at their discretion.

While Apple HomePod has made great strides in catching up with its competition it still remains in fourth place during the first quarter of 2018 behind Amazon, Google and Alibaba. As reported earlier by Slice Intelligence, Alexa devices were 73 percent of all devices shipped during thefirst quarter followed by Google Home at 14 percent, Apple HomePod at 10 percent and Sonos One at 2 percent.

Best Opinion Pieces

Unfortunately, there were no opinion pieces that captured out attention this week but that’s sure to change in our next update !